The yearning for a strongman
Seattle's post-election blues rekindle a desire for bigger government, run by a big boss. But we've done very well without either, thank you.
Every time the Puget Sound region's powerful are thwarted, the cry goes out for a strongman. Would that someone could lead us out of the Valley of Confusion and Consensus! Our process is broken, our future grim, the villagers are running amuck and consorting with that damnable Tim Eyman again. The voters just don't know what's good for them!
It reminds me of that old joke about the guy who asks a group of marching people how he can get to the head of the parade. "They need me up there," he says, "for I am their leader!"
Strongman talk is rampant in the wake of the Proposition 1 failure. The power-players are pumping the creation of a region-wide uber-agency that would take charge of the transportation "mess." Why this new uber-agency would be any more successful than all the "old" regional entities (Sound Transit, RTID, Metro, the counties) is unclear, but there is certainly a belief that no one is in charge around here.
Flash back to a power luncheon at the Olympic Four Seasons Hotel in the mid-1990s. Somehow, I was seated near the powerful lawyer Judy Runstad. The name of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was mentioned and Runstad swooned. "Norman Schwarzkopf for president!" she burbled, apparently giddy at the the idea of Stormin' Norman whipping America into shape just like he'd chased the Iraqis back to Baghdad. (A Schwarzkopf motto: "When in command, take charge!")
She hasn't been the only civic leader attracted to a he-man.
The argument goes that most of our regional transportation players aren't up to taking control: King County Exec Ron Sims flip-flops, Gov. Chris Gregoire wallows in the quagmire of Seattle politics, gubernatorial wannabe Dino Rossi avoids specifics, developer Kemper Freeman is old-school and too self-serving, Mayor Greg Nickels mimics strongmanism but doesn't have the chops – if he did, he wouldn't have failed on the waterfront tunnel and ducked on 520. Speaking of chops, House Speaker Frank Chopp is powerful but he can't be trusted – he's a closet populist, you know.
What we need is someone to come in and knock heads and make the trains run on time. A Rudy Giuliani, a Robert Moses, a Richard Daley, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, a – just what is Norman Schwarkopf up to these days?
Such yearnings defy our history. The development of Seattle and Puget Sound has always occurred on a complex battlefield. Power has always been suspect and authority decentralized at every turn. Political machines have been weak or short-lived, the people have ruled with initiatives, ballot measures, advisory votes. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes, but it's us.
In Seattle, visionaries clashed: R.H. Thomson, the engineer who built roads, sewers, and washed away hillsides, fought tooth and nail with John Olmsted over parks, boulevards and the shape of the city to come. The voters backed them both at different times. Both visions made Seattle what it is today. One man made the toilets flush, the other infused the modern city with nature and beauty.
We've voted on freeways only to see them stopped in their tracks (R.H. Thomson Expressway); we've opposed roadways through parks (Woodland), then seen them built them anyway (not unlike some stadiums). We've elected and recalled mayors and we relish changing our minds. We rejected light rail, then passed it, then rejected extending again; we passed the monorail, then rejected it, too. When Metro was first proposed, it was seen as a regional octopus strangling the suburbs with its tentacles. We voted it down, then voted for it, then merged it with King County, then created Sound Transit and the RTID, and now there's talk of yet another incarnation.
A cascade of decisions and revisions. Fitting for a wet place, we're fluid, not fixed. It may look like chaos – it may even be chaotic at times – but it hasn't stopped growth or progress or prosperity. Our process, such as it is, has resulted in one of the most loved, cherished, most desirable, most habitable metropolitan regions in the country. The questions are: How do we take care of it? How do we continue it? How do we improve it?
Part of the answer lies in our "flawed" processes. We've thrived by giving no one too much power, by never ceding anything we can't take back, by approving and disapproving every step of the way. By resisting the strongman urge.
Our leaders aren't all weak. I think they represent a people whose strength is not being too sure of themselves.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 7:24 a.m. Inappropriate
Raise You One Intelligent Designer: Skip, the Cascadia Center For Regional Development will see your Norman Schwarkopf and raise you one Intelligent Designer. Beat that for a Strongman.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 7:53 a.m. Inappropriate
Sheep usually need to be herded: Yep, It's the same old story you put 20 people with advanced degrees in public administration into a room and they will need to hire a facilitator to order lunch.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 8:34 a.m. Inappropriate
Though they like to call neighbors who rightly oppose their corporate welfare incompetence 'NIMBY's" the fact is that the cycle of wrongful 'Strongarming' begins with them and their friends.
Put forth a solid design backed up with good administration and witheveryone paying their fair share, and it will pass.
Greg Nickels Viaduct is a great example of how not to do this, as was the Committee driven Prop. 1. Gregoire might look like she's leading on 520, but don't forget we don't even have a final design yet and forecast is for Viaduct 2.
Rossi, if he can work with Sims, perhaps with the assistance of Chopp and Helen Sommers have a shot at figuring it out, and staying on the time schedule of a 2012 construction start date.
Though the Seattle Times and Crosscut evidenced the same blind PR responsiveness prior to the Prop. 1. vote the Times has clearly shown they are not up to challenges of change, and leadership. Although it was ineveitable, now living in Pierce County, I'm gonna take this moment to cancel my subscription. Hopefully they'll occassionally publish something worthy of note online.
BTW, Knute - if you are our new Stalin can I be General Schwartzkopf?
-Douglas Tooley
Lincoln, Tacoma
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 11:33 a.m. Inappropriate
Rossi? What the heck?: Why the heck does Rossi have a chance to do anything when all he's ever done is cut services and sell real estate? The guy can't even stake out a position, gimme a break.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 12:14 p.m. Inappropriate
A parallel problem is the tendency for the region's leaders to prefer and propose the most grandiose and expensive "solutions" to every "problem", and yes, even invent or certainly exaggerate the problem, if necessary.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 12:15 p.m. Inappropriate
The toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and the other bridges operated by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) were and are enormous, amounting to USD$933.1 million in 2002. The money from the bridge pays for a portion of the public transit subsidy for the New York City Transit Authority and the commuter railroads. The bridge carries approximately 200,000 vehicles per day. ... Toll: $4.50 (between any 2 boroughs per car in cash); discount available with E-ZPass.
Eventually Moses highway vision of the 1930's became calcified and in the 1960's was less than responsive to change and criticism. Although his power was more or less absolute, his infrastructure legacy was gradually eroded by demographics, population growth and time as summarized below by Amazon commentator Allen Smalling:
As time wore on Moses became less and less the man of the people and more and more the man of the system of his own creation, and that system was the toll-gathering mechanism of New York's bridges and tunnels. He invented that peculiar institution, the "authority" ... that is neither wholly governmental nor wholly private, and so lacks the restraints of either; Moses' cash cows kept him in power and gave him an antidemocratic arrogance that is truly breathtaking and, one hopes, will never be duplicated.
Note that the Moses legacy reveals our own transportation legacy. Smalling again:
America's other big cities are New York writ small--they went to New York at the height of Moses' power and emulated his methods! That helps us understand the mania for building our now hopelessly overcrowded expressways and devaluing public transportation, whose lack we are just now trying to address by building expensive light-rail and commuter-train systems that should have been in place for decades.
Unfortunately, some of the Moses methods one may recognize (from Amazon commentator Bruce Applebaum):
It was his way or no way -- and once he became firmly entrenched there was no "no way." A typical Moses tactic: design a great public work (bridge, for example) and underestimate the budget. A bargain sure to be approved and funded by the politicians! Then run out of money halfway through construction. The rest of the money will surely be forthcoming because no politician wants to be associated with a half-finished and very visible "failure" -- it's much better to take credit for an "against the odds" success.
A keen observer might note that Sound Transit's Sound Move is a good example of this method, and Prop 1's 20-year build schedule and 50-year taxing authority is a perfect recipe for continuation of this method. Obviously, these sorts of methods and and their associated Strong Men are less than appealing. What we have now regionally is a Moses-like legacy, but with no Moses and only modest revenue-producing infrastructure. If we had a Mose like figure in charge, would it do any good? Well maybe. See next post.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 12:42 p.m. Inappropriate
Only in Seattle...: ...would the political establishment fret that the government has too *little* control over our lives. Those of us in The Rest of the State have message for Seattle: Mind your own freakin' business. Establish your own little Politburo and run yourselves into the ground with a parasitic over-reaching all-encompassing nanny-state tyranny, but leave the rest of us alone.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 1:41 p.m. Inappropriate
Mr Sreedharan has a disarmingly simple explanation for his success: the ownership structure of DMRC. Half the equity is held by the central government, and half by the Delhi authorities. Instead of doubling the amount of bureaucratic meddling, Mr Sreedharan says this almost eliminates it: there is no government ministry to which every file has to be passed. Decision-making is speeded up further by the board's delegation of authority to him. When he took the job [he] he demanded, and was given, full power to pick his team and a promise of non-interference. ...An engineer and career officer of state-owned Indian Railways, he had spent much of the 1990s running what was then the world's biggest overground-railway building project [the Konkan Railway, which] was the first such infrastructure contract in India ever awarded on 'build, operate and transfer' principles.
Mr Sreedharan's experience taught him two [lessons].The first is to insist on the global best, rather than to favour Indian firms. The metro's consultants are led by a consortium from Japan (whose government has financed two-thirds of the metro's cost through a soft loan); the signalling and fare-collection systems are French, the rolling-stock Korean.
The second is an emphasis on avoiding the scourge that plagues so many Indian public-sector ventures: corruption. He has tried to purify DMRC's procurement processes by removing almost every element of subjectivity from tender-evaluation. He has also had to show the door to some employees who did not meet his exacting standards.
Mr. S's example points to what we might want to have happen locally:
First, to make things happen on time and on budget, we need an engineering organization with political and financial independence.
Second, we need an engineering superstar who is the veteran of previous large-scale infrastructure projects. This means we have competence and leadership in one person. Politicians aren't competent to run transportation infrastructure projects; appointed boards and councils even less so.
Third, give the strong man the authority to get things done: non-interference and the right to pick one's own team.
Fourth, pick the global best! Looking locally can be a prescription for disaster.
Fifth, think consortium. Did you note in the India example how the Japanese consortium funded 2/3 of the cost?! Maybe a consortium of major players -- employers and contractors -- could help with funding.
Sixth, get rid of the Seattle equivalent of India's overt corruption by removing every "element of subjectivity from tender-evaluation." This means looking critically at the bloated cost of infrastructure projects and the web of special interest requirements that inflate costs beyond all reason. For example, prevailing wage requirements, double taxation on projects, local contractor requirements preventing use of "the global best", windfall bond placement fees to big legal firms, and enormous environmental & permitting costs. (This is mainly a finger pointing at any of the powers that be who have no competition but are assured a "cut" of taxpayer proceeds when we build. Let's make everyone compete for and justify what they get.)
Seventh, Mossback, your recent article on the Corrupt Bastards Club of Alaska pointed out how sometimes corruption is surprisingly blatant. In those cases, and in cases of sheer incompetence, we must have the ability to quickly "show the door."
To sum up, let's find a local or "globally best" Mr. S. who can implement the seven-point criteria above.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 3:57 p.m. Inappropriate
Prop. 1 was a classic example: wide disparaties in costs, transportation benefits, and environmental impacts. So who does the voter believe -- the self-interested politicians and transportation agency planners at RTID, the ultra greenie environmentalists at the Sierra Club and their political friends, or the newspapers who try to sort it out but end up providing a wide range of outcomes that encompass all views and confuse people even more?
So here's one answer: Change state law to require the chief regional planning agency, the Puget Sound Regional Council, to do an explicit and thorough cost/benefit analysis that can inform voters. In the case of Prop. 1, it would have identified and estimated all construction and operating cost categories, including inflation costs and borrowing costs, over the life of the project. It would have placed values on estimated benefits: trip time savings, fuel savings, and reduced environmental impacts, including carbon footprint. It would be upfront about assumptions that affect these values, such as future life styles, land uses, and transporation technologies, both public and private. It would inevitably lead to ranges of costs and benefits, not single values. And if some benefits turn out to be negative rather than positive, truth rather than truthiness should be the rule.
The PSRC would have considered all reasonable projects submitted by state and local transporation agencies, and they would have invited the public to submit its ideas (e.g. fix the viaduct rather than rebuild it, tunnel 520 through Mountlake rather than bridge it, expand the small connector bus fleet using both public and private resources like Microsoft, etc). And they would have prioritized the candidate projects using a set of selection criteria including time dependent benefits, safety, probability of catastrophic failure, etc.
Finally, since even local professional planners may be subject to political pressures, all of the work should be reviewed by an independent expert technical panel comprised of people with no financial interest in any of the projects and preferably drawn from outside the region.
It would seem that we are smart enough to fix the process once and for all -- before the next vote even.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 5:44 p.m. Inappropriate
RE: Needed: reliable information: What is the name of the president of the PRSC ? John Ladenburg, Cheer leader in chief for Prop 1 and soon to be candidate for AG for the State of Washington. The Prop 1 plan was so flawed they couldn't even get a "Do Pass " vote from the SCA (Suburban Cities Association) a sub committee of the PRSC. The PRSC is the ultimate "Old Boys Club" and not an honest broker. They have an agenda and the elimination of SOV is a stated goal.
Posted Tue, Nov 13, 9:38 p.m. Inappropriate
The people who collect this data seem even-handed and able to dispassionately convey the facts necessary for planning. If that group within the PSRC could be peeled off and made a separate organzation with the goal of objectivity and disinterestedness, then your proposal makes a huge amount of sense, while also addressing Cameron's concerns about political agendas at the top skewing what's presented. Focusing their good work on providing the information needed by voters would be a HUGE step forward. Voters are typically either hoodwinked or confused by bond measures. Laying out the facts would give knowledgeable citizens from different perspectives the ability to vet plans and make honest assessments before votes take place. This eliminates confusion and also gets a full set of reliable and appropriate numbers in front of voters, rather than just cherry-picked data, or some of the data, or extraneous data or bogus data.
As for whether we need a czar, I don't think it's as simple as yes or no. We need competent leaders with clear missions and responsibilities. If one of those leaders proves effective and competent, then give him more and more authority to make things happen. But let's start with people who have track records of accomplishment. A person who's able to make a $10B project happen on time and on budget can be worth as much as $10B, because taking twice as long and twice as much money to complete your average large government infrastructure project is so common.
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